THE LIFE AND WORK OF CHARLOTTE PERKINS GILMAN

Charlotte Anna Perkins was born on 3 July, 1860 in the New England town of Hartford, Connecticut. She was the daughter of Mary Fitch Westcott and librarian and writer Frederick Beecher Perkins. 

In 1884 she married fellow artist Charles Walter Stetson (1858-1911) with whom she had a daughter Katharine Beecher Stetson (b.1885). Her ensuing depression, possibly post-partum, and nervous breakdown affected her for years to come. Gilman went to a sanitorium in Philadelphia in 1887 where she was treated by Dr. Silas Weir Mitchell, who is the doctor in “The Yellow Wallpaper”. His `rest cure’ included no physical or intellectual stimulation and he roundly forbade Gilman to write, suggesting she `live as domestic a life as possible’.

Rejecting this harsh pronouncement, Gilman moved to California around 1888 after also separating from her husband, and became involved with social reform and feminist groups, conducting lectures in North America and the United Kingdom on various subjects as trade unions and women’s suffrage. She also had articles published in the New England Magazine. The Giant Wistaria (1891) was followed by “The Yellow Wallpaper” (1892), and In This Our World (1893) a collection of her poems.

In 1896 Gilman was living in Chicago, Illinois where she continued to write and associate with numerous other pioneering women of social reform including Jane Addams and Ellen Gates Starr, founders of the settlement house `Hull House’. Gilman’s Women and Economics: A Study of the Economic Relation Between Men and Women as a Factor in Social Relations (1898) became a best seller which was translated into several different languages and highly lauded internationally, making her one of the few commercially successful women writers of the time. In 1900 she married her cousin George Houghton Gilman (who died suddenly in 1934), a lawyer in New York city.

Concerning Children (1900) was followed by The Home: Its Work and Influence(1903). Gilman was also busy writing for and publishing her own monthly journalThe Forerunner from 1909-1916. What Diantha Did (1910), Suffrage Song and Verses (1911), The Man Made World or Our Androcentric Culture (1911), andMoving the Mountain (1911) were followed by Herland (1915). It is the utopian tale of three male explorers who discover an all-female society, free of war, poverty, and oppressive domination. With Her in Ourland (1916) followed. Gilman also wrote His Religion and Hers in 1923.

In 1932 Gilman was diagnosed with inoperable breast cancer and by 1934 had moved back to California. She died by an overdose of chloroform on 17 August, 1935. The Living of Charlotte Perkins Gilman: An Autobiography (1935). In 1994 Gilman was inducted into the National Women’s Hall of Fame in Seneca, New York.